Volume 6,
Issue 2,
1957

Sutton's remarkably lengthy and complete textbook of dermatology boasts 1479 pages, much of it in small type, and 1972 illustrations. In his preface, the author describes how a volume such as this came into being. For years, Sutton has abstracted every article related to skin disease that he has seen. His description of a disease often consists of a reference to the original report of the condition, a statement of its ordinary manifestations, and several references to the variations the process may exhibit. The result is a textbook in which almost everything pertaining to dermatology is at least mentioned. A vast array of references to the literature is included within the text material in parentheses instead of in footnotes or at the end of the chapter. This method of writing is at once the book's greatest virtue and its most serious weakness.Valuable indeed is the host of references so conveniently placed and the inclusion of so many subjects, but at the same time it makes for a somewhat less orderly, reasoned, and didactic approach to the description of disease entities.

In attempting to review so competent and comprehensive a survey by Esther Everett Lape and her associates Eleanor M. Phillips and Margaret Thomas Edgar, and the secretarial staff, Helen C. Hahn, Hazel Berry, and Evelyn R. Hahn, one thinks of Robert Louis Stevenson's remark on matrimony, that “when a man marries he domesticates the Recording Angel.” These 1504 pages convey a remarkable number of significant facts so well chosen and so skillfully presented as to excite awe as well as admiration.